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This article about the enigmatic Bruton Dovecote was first published in the online magazine Localeyez
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Bruton's dovecote
A friend who was visiting Bruton recently asked me about the history of the dovecote. When I said that I didn’t know much about it, an eyebrow was raised and a remark passed about how someone with an interest in history should, really, know more about the ancient monument visible from their kitchen window. I did a little investigating. It’s hard to imagine, now, but Bruton was once just a clearing in a great forest that stretched east all the way to Frome and westwards beyond Castle Cary. The hill where the dovecote now stands and the River Brue decided the town’s location. It’s not actually known how old Bruton is, but its first settlement was probably Celtic (Iron Age), and later there were almost certainly Romans here, perhaps a villa or two in the forest. A few coins have been found and there are Roman roads close by. … read more | |||
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LiteratureWorks is a registered charity that encourages literature development in South West England. It is a resource not only for for writers and organisations, but also for everyone, of any age, who values literature. Kylie is on the LiteratureWorks directory as a writer, editor and course facilitator. This is a recent blog for their website on writing historical fiction. WEBSITE
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Writing History
'At a workshop I gave recently someone asked what, from the writer’s point of view, distinguished historical novels from other genre fiction. My first instinct was to defend historical novels against being seen as genre fiction in the first place. Genre is a useful guide for publishers and booksellers, given that marketing a novel relies on knowing its readership and who to pitch it to. Genre fiction, though, is a term that is usually used to describe popular fiction; usually more commercial, plot-driven novels. Historical fiction doesn’t neatly fit into either of these definitions of genre. Some historical novels are motivated by biographical or political documentation, some are gothic thrillers, others crime or ghost stories or romances. Some are mainstream, others considered ‘literary’, which is another publishing term for a novel that appeals to a certain type of reader. Hilary Mantel and Andrew Miller, for instance, are generally considered to be literary authors, and both have recently won major literary prizes for historical novels. … read more | |||
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Article written for Galleria, the HWA magazine, for Historical Writing Month, November 2013.
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The History Writers
‘The first law of history is to tell the truth,’ said Cicero in the first century BC. Yet the histories written in Greek and Latin, Aramaic and the languages of ancient Asia in the thousand years before Cicero do not conform to a fixed truth. The Christian gospels, supposedly synonymous with truth, do not agree with each other by a wide margin, and were not written by, or in the lifetime of, those whose names they take but are thought to have been composed between eighty and two hundred years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Ancient writers of histories, like modern writers of history, made choices about how to present material gathered from records, artefacts and memories. They told stories. Broadly speaking, they based their narratives on actual events, but it remains that what we think of today as history and, almost by definition, truth, could be more truthfully described as partiality. … read more | |||
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Article written for Kylie's Australian publisher to coincide with the release of The Silver Thread.
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Historical context for The Silver Thread
“A chance remark by my sister, a curator, provided the inspiration for The Silver Thread. We were wandering around the National Gallery in Canberra, where she worked, and she mentioned The Rajah Quilt. I’d never heard of it and, although I’m Australian, I knew very little about female convicts or transportation. I felt the little buzz of excitement that so often signals the beginnings of a story. At the time, I’d just finished my second novel and I was casting about for an idea for a third. Although the quilt is not kept on permanent display – it is far too fragile – I asked to arrange a viewing. The minute I saw it, I knew that I had to write about it and that I had found the beginnings of my novel. The Rajah Quilt is an extraordinary object. It measures more than three metres on each side and, I discovered later, is made up of 2,815 individual pieces of patchwork. … read more | ||
